Ethernet has a long history. It has become dominant in enterprise networks. This dominance has led to high production-volume components, which in turn have allowed extremely low cost per bit. Likewise Ethernet has a long history of re-inventing itself. From the original copper coaxial cable format (“thicknet”) it has extended its scope to nearly all copper, optical fiber and wireless physical media. Bit rates have continued to increase, traditionally growing tenfold each time a new rate is defined. Gigabit Ethernet interfaces are widely deployed in PCs and servers, and 10 Gbit/s in local area network (LAN) backbones. Rates up to 100 Gigabit Ethernet were standardized in 2010 and 2011. Ethernet's dominance is partly attributed to the simple advantages for the industry of adopting a single standard to drive up volumes and drive down prices. In part, it is also due to ease of deployment, using its ability to self-configure based on the key concepts of “learning bridge” (flooding, and associating learned destination addresses with bridge ports) and “spanning tree protocol” (the protocol used for avoiding bridging loops).
Ethernet is a fairly simple protocol which has scaled to hundreds of thousands of times faster speeds and consistently been able to adapt to meet the needs and demands of new markets. For example, time domain capabilities are being added to IEEE 802.3 Ethernet to support IEEE 802.1 Audio Video Bridging (AVB), and these capabilities will be applicable to time sensitive carrier applications likewise IEEE 1588. Customer LAN networks are increasingly connected to wide-area telecommunications networks over Ethernet interfaces or to devices that bridge digital subscriber line (DSL) or wireless to these. Moreover, customers are familiar with the capabilities of Ethernet networks, and would like to extend these capabilities to multi-site networks. Meanwhile the needs of such networks have expanded to include many services previously handled only on the LAN or by specialized connections, notably video and backup.
Ethernet as a service (EaaS) is the use of high-bandwidth, fiber optic media such as Packet over SONET (PoS) to deliver 10 Mbps, 100 Mbps or even 1000 Mbps Ethernet service to one or more customers across a common bidirectional broadband infrastructure. Ethernet, a networking technology defined in IEEE 802.3 and related specifications, is best understood as a carrier sense multiple access/collision detect (CSMA/CD) form of baseband networking. The service arrives to the recipient via a broadband channel that it must accommodate, manage, and service within its overall infrastructure. Key concerns for implementation include careful provision and management of bandwidth so that one user's consumption of best-effort Internet services and high-bandwidth realtime services (such as voice, video on demand, or streaming media) does not lead to resource contention or performance or stability problems. Most carriers address these issues by designing their infrastructure to support multiple Ethernet overlays across a shared optical layer that uses wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) or dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) to accommodate the load and to achieve appropriate economies of scale and cost per bit of communications.
However, provisioning Ethernet services, for example an E-LAN service, requires programming many network elements. An E-LAN service with 50 endpoints requires programming 50 network elements, for example. In each network element, multiple entities need to be programmed in a specific sequence when the Ethernet service is provisioned. Configuration of each entity across multiple network elements is needed to achieve correct packet flows for the Ethernet service. Some equipment vendors offer TL1 and device specific user interfaces to aid programming Ethernet service specific entities. Using these interfaces, users have to manually program each network element, program entities in a specific order, and ensure consistency across network elements. This process is tedious and error prone. In fact, most products offer management interfaces such as CLI or some graphical interface but it is limited to programming one network element. Users have to do the heavy lifting of programming many network elements in a consistent manner.
Accordingly, there is a need for systems, apparatus, and methods that improve upon conventional approaches including the improved methods, system and apparatus provided hereby.